Japanese otaku have fought back against Chinese propaganda by turning the favourite anti-Japanese insult of the Chinese into a moe character.

Some explanation is in order – “Japanese devils” (literally, “Japanese devil children”) is a traditional Chinese racist insult towards the Japanese, having come into common currency during WWII and been maintained by anti-Japanese propaganda ever since.

In Chinese it is 日本鬼子 / rìběn guǐzi (read as “nihon onigo” in Japanese), meaning simply “Japanese devils” (incidentally, 鬼子/guǐzi on its own is also the traditional “foreign devils” insult Chinese apply to westerners in general).

With the anti-Japanese riots in China, the term has seen plenty of recent usage.

Japanese artists on 2ch decided to use moe to appropriate the term and “turn the Chinese into moetards,” creating “Hi-no-Moto Oniko” based on an alternative reading of the 日本鬼子 characters – the characters for Japan, 日本, mean “origin of the sun” (Hi no Moto) and 鬼子 can be rendered into a female name, “Oniko.”

Chinese confronted with these lovely creatures are perplexed:

I didn’t think it would turn out like this… I just don’t understand that country.

Damn, just damn. Japan is a dangerous country. Perhaps we should admit our loss.

We boo and jeer them and their response is a moe character… We’re helpless before them.

Riben Guizi is a moe character!? What can we call them now? Japs? Creepy otaku?

Related to this is the “little Japan” (小日本 / xiǎo rìběn) epithet used disparagingly by contemporary Chinese Japan-haters to refer to Japan – this also gives 小日本鬼子 (“little Japanese devils”), which has been co-opted into the devastatingly cute “little Oniko”:

More fruits of the “Let’s make Hi-no-Moto Oniko into a moe character and turn all those racist Chinese into moetards” project:

Chinese otaku who commented on the issue and said to be "perplexed" by Oniko are never anti-Japanese to begin with. Heh I have already seen an ecchi Oniko doujin released by them. Talk about speed and efficiency...

On the other hand I highly doubt the extreme nationalists will give a shit to Japanese 2D drawings. They just treat them like ukiyo-e anyway and will hardly be able to see anything moe out of them.

Still, kudos to the 2ch for doing something more productive than throwing random insults at gaijin.

"GuiZi" is not really "Devils" but more "Deamons" in the Chinese language and culture.
China has no imagination about the christian devil, but a shitload of evil and bloodthirsty deamons coming from the underworld to burn, pillage and terrorize the living.
And that, what the Japanese díd, and still lot of Japanese right-wingers agreed to, is pretty much fitting to the traditional Chinese imagination about those evil spirits and deamons...
This terms depicts a being, that does things no ordinary human mind can think of, things that are so terrifying and inhuman, that it has to be something out of this world.

Watch this, and tell for yourself wether the Japanese should be called "Deamons" or not:

And the Americans should just move back to Europe while enslaving themselves to the Africans.
And the Turks should give Asia Minor back to the
Greeks so they could re-establish the Byzantine Empire.
Oh, and your ancestral one-celled organism ate MY one-celled ancestor's plancton it had been savoring for a long time, thus causing my one-celled ancestor conciderable grief and suffering. It would be only just that you get yourself slain in a very unconfortable manner to repent for this crime.

...I could go on, but I don't think that I have to labour my point any more.

Hey, stupid, quit the racist talk and do something productive in your own life before I become tempted to physically hunt you down, rip off your pants and then hang the pants on a public school's flagpole while photographing you in your underwear!

I agree, Japan and America should go to hell for what they did. But China should be the first to go to hell for the shit they did to their own people.
A nation that betrays it's own people through oppression, murder, torture is a thousand times worse than a nation that brings such upon another.

I´d kill every single of those creatures. If after watching the japanese anime you think little cute girls with horns or weapons are anything other but terrifyingly violent, merciless and dangerous creatures, so different from humans that we cant exist together - you know shit about japanese anime.

Btw 子 doesn't always have to mean "child." In 日本鬼子 it's just 'Japanese Devil.' 鬼 pretty much covers any evil creature though from trolls to ghosts to demons.

iirc Japanese were also described as 倭寇, something to the effect of 'midget pirates' or 'dwarf raiders' waaaay back in the, I dunno, 1400s? 1500s? Anyways back then it seemed notable to the Han ethnicity that Japanese were somehow physically smaller and had a tradition of piracy up and down the coast of China.
Of course, 小日本 is purely an expression of belittlement, I don't think it comments on their height.

Anyways, it's pretty stupid but Asians have a bad habit of keeping these eternal grudges. When will they grow up?

For the record, though I have no idea what they were labeled, there were Chinese pirates back in the day. In fact, the Chinese were arguably the most successful at it, at least amongst the Asian cultures, seeing as one of the MOST successful pirates in history was a Chinese woman. Yes, woman.

Her name was (well, is usually written in English text as) Ching Shih. Not only was she an excellent pirate captain, but at her height, she controlled tens of thousands of men in a whole fleet - a fleet so good it beat the actual Chinese navy. Repeatedly. In fact, she was undefeated - they were so sick of fighting her and losing that they actually bought her fleet from her and paid her to retire. Her fleet was absorbed into the actual Chinese navy, and she settled down to run a gambling house - one of the only notorious pirates in history to successfully retire I might add.

Sure, she might be an exception to the rule - but she was Chinese, and she was not just a pirate, but one of the world's most successful ones.

So, you know. It's not like there were no Chinese pirates, ever. :P

And "80k men" is kind of a lot of pirates, even if we're just counting Ching Shih's armada by itself...

Wait a second, she was SOO BADASS that she managed to make the Government go "SHUT AND TAKE MY MONEY" at her because they were fed up with fighting her and losing(also I assume a huge fleet of experienced Pirates is a pretty nice looking thing to add to the Navy)

they used to call gaijin as 洋鬼子 as well. the 鬼子 does not necessary means devil, its more like scolding others as "bitches" or "dumbass", its just to call others by not using the word "人" which mean people. the chinese has a way of thinking that they are superior so other races are not like themselves so they call other races 鬼子.

Well to be fair, at the time the phrase became popular was when foreigners first arrived to China in mass, which was during their last dynasty. Where they were getting exploited by the outsiders like crazy (opium trade, etc). The inability of the weak imperial court to act against foreign oppression means calling foreigner insulting names was pretty much the only satisfaction ordinary Chinese can get in those days.

I didn’t think it would turn out like this… I just don’t understand that country.

Damn, just damn. Japan is a dangerous country. Perhaps we should admit our loss.

We boo and jeer them and their response is a moe character… We’re helpless before them.

Riben Guizi is a moe character!? What can we call them now? Japs? Creepy otaku??"

Anonymous Japs on 2ch pretending to be Chinese. Chinese doesn't have alternative readings anyway. It would be like someone tell you that you can read "pizza" as "shitstain" and laugh about it. Not in our language...